Carol Burris' testimony on the current testing regime
On Monday, the NYS Senate held hearings on testing. Here is the testimony of Carol Burris, LI principal and one of the co-authors of the principals' letter to Commissioner King.
Dear Senator Flanagan:
I would like to thank you for holding a public hearing on the evolution of student assessments. It is vitally important that we think long and hard about the role of assessments, the quality of assessments, the learning we wish to measure by assessments, and the appropriateness of the assessment for the child being tested. It is also important that policymakers understand the limitations of assessments—they are a snapshot of a subset of skills and content knowledge. Truth be told, learning that is important is often left out of standardized assessments due to cost as well as the difficulty involved in measuring non-traditional achievement.
When I became a principal, nearly thirteen years ago, the era of high-stakes testing known as NCLB was just beginning. I was in a doctoral program at Teachers College at the time. I would argue with great passion for why we needed NCLB and testing to close the achievement gap. I can remember many a discussion with former commissioner, Thomas Sobol, who was one of our professors, on the topic of high stakes testing. Frankly, Dr. Sobol was right, and I was wrong. The downside of high-stakes standardized testing has far outweighed the good.
During the past twelve years, I have seen our Regents exams diluted in rigor. I have seen the raw scores for passing bounce up and down. Many exams, especially in mathematics, have become collections of questions